The Los Angeles school district’s attempt to give all its students an iPad was a billion-dollar disaster. Baltimore County and its ambitious young superintendent hope to succeed where L.A. failed.
Baltimore County Superintendent Dallas Dance with students using the county's new devices.
Baltimore County Public Schools
As the Baltimore school system goes all-in on an ambitious plan to equip every student with a tablet computer, it's tough not to see the ghosts of the Los Angeles Unified School District's $1 billion iPad disaster looming over the project.
In L.A., everything that could have gone wrong with the program did. Teachers' unions opposed it almost from the beginning, and were reluctant or unable to integrate the devices into their classrooms. The expensive software was unfinished and rarely used, and the district's infrastructure was ill-equipped to handle the influx of gadgets. Leaked emails hinted at corruption on behalf of district officials. The whole thing eventually collapsed, leaving behind a contentious fight for refunds from Apple and education giant Pearson, and investigations by the FBI and SEC into the entire process.
While the L.A. disaster was a setback for digitizing America's classrooms, it has given school chiefs across the county a practical lesson in the pitfalls of a technology rollout. It led many districts, like the massive Miami Dade district, to pause and rethink their own initiatives, scaling them back or taking a closer look at how the devices would be used.
Baltimore County Public Schools are forging ahead with their own tablet program, which will be one of the country's largest. But consider superintendent S. Dallas Dance's apparent blueprint for the rollout: Look at everything that L.A. did, and then do the opposite.
Baltimore County Public Schools
LA's specter aside, there have been other successful digital rollouts in other districts. Dallas Dance is a protegé of Mark Edwards, the superintendent who oversaw one of the country's most-acclaimed digital initiatives in North Carolina's Mooresville Graded School District, which bought a MacBook for every one of its students. The New York Times called it a "laptop success story."
But that involved just 4,400 students in grades four through twelve. What Dance wants to do is much bigger and more expensive — and much riskier.
Dance was just 30 years old when he was brought in from Houston in 2012 to run the Baltimore County Schools, the country's 18th-largest school system: A $1.6 billion budget, more than 100 schools, 17,000 employees, and 100,000 students, half of whom are from low-income families and more than half of whom are students of color. (Baltimore County's school district is made up of the suburbs and outlying towns of Baltimore; the city of Baltimore has its own, separate, school system.)
Dance's office, in the leafy suburb of Towson, Maryland, sits in a beautiful old brick building on a hill. Dance, handsome and broad shouldered, strides in and out of almost-constant meetings, talks fast, and rarely goes off script.
"We asked ourselves, what's our purpose of our school system?" Dance said, seconds after sitting down for an interview. "We want to prepare students to be globally competitive, and for that, we need a digital learning environment. We need to level the playing field so that everyone gets access, regardless of school, regardless of community."
As the district's youngest-ever superintendent, Dance immediately attracted controversy in Baltimore County, where teachers and residents balked at his youth and lack of experience. He needed to get a special waiver to take the job, lacking the minimum of three years' teaching experience required by the district.
Once in place, Dance moved fast, ordering a rewrite of curriculum to align with Common Core standards, closing some schools and opening others, and overhauling student schedules. Just a year into the job, he set out to put a tablet into the hands of every one of Baltimore County's 100,000 students. The $205 million "one-to-one" initiative was approved in March of 2014; by September, the first devices were in classrooms.
By the time Baltimore's initiative was approved, L.A.'s much-touted $1 billion iPad initiative had already begun to unravel, taking with it the reputation of the district's superintendent, John Deasy. Less than a year old, the program had been plagued by reports that teachers had received almost no training, that the pricey Pearson curriculum preloaded on the iPads was unfinished and rarely used, and that within days, high school students had figured out how to break through the device's security features.
Months later, the initiative collapsed entirely in the wake of emails released by the L.A. Times suggesting Deasy had improperly favored Apple and Pearson executives during the initiative's bidding process. The FBI and the Securities and Exchange Commission both launched investigations, and the program was quickly suspended, then dropped.
Weeks later, a report by an outside firm found teachers had barely used the iPads or the curriculum — just one teacher out of 245 was using Pearson's software, and just 30 were using the devices to teach English or math.
In Baltimore County, Dance vows, things will be different.
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